The XFlow platform is a comprehensive solution for video management and restreaming, offering a wide range of features and capabilities to meet various operational needs. Key features of the platform include:
Intuitive user interface: The platform includes a highly intuitive web user interface for video viewing, camera and management, and platform administration.
Open API: The platform includes a fully featured web API for external systems integration, exposing all platform capabilities. This includes supporting the configuration and monitoring of servers (streaming engine instances), streams, and cameras, and low-latency camera control.
Best-in-class video viewing and camera control: The platform supports highly intuitive video viewing and responsive camera control, incorporating stream tours, camera preset tours, and personalized wall presets / layouts.
Automated Camera Stream Configuration Management: The platform supports automating the configuration and maintenance of the video streams supplied by each (ONVIF compliant) camera, through the creation and assignment of stream templates, which incorporate framerate, maximum bitrate, target resolution, and other encoding parameters.
Modern and mature stream format support: The platform supports restreaming live video to web browsers, mobile devices, laptops, workstations, video walls, unattended displays, video recording systems, and external systems.
1.3 Video Protocols Matrix (H.264)
Active monitoring: The platform monitors the status and performance of servers (streaming engine instances and their hosts), as well as the streams they ingest, in real time. It provides information about stream characteristics and availability, restreaming activity, and resource utilization, among other metrics. A rolling history of this information is retained by the platform and made available to authorized external systems via the XFlow REST API. The platform also monitors the state and status of configured cameras, including device information, current PTZ position, and presets.
On-demand stream ingestion: The platform supports the on-demand ingestion of input streams, such that a given stream is only ingested when viewed by an end user. This feature is often required to support cameras with metered (i.e., wireless) connections, and hosting environments with limited resources. Input stream ingestion can be initiated by a request for any output stream protocol, including RTSP/S, RTMP/S, HLS, LLHLS, and WebRTC.
Input conversion: The platform supports the re-multiplexing and transcoding of input streams, such that streams can be converted from one format and/or quality to another, prior to restreaming. This allows the platform to support various legacy formats, such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, as well as to reduce the bitrate, resolution, and/or frame rate of input streams.
Video multicasting: The platform supports the multicasting of live streams, provided through the use of RTSP (RTP/RTCP). A multicast IP range is assigned to each server for dynamic use, which can be overridden by the explicit assignment of a multicast IP to individual streams.
Video publishing: The platform supports the publishing or ‘pushing’ of live streams to one or more destination servers, configurable on a stream-by-stream basis. Currently supported publishing protocols include RTSP/S and RTMP/S.
Low-latency restreaming: The platform supports low-latency and ultra-low-latency streaming for applications requiring real-time video delivery, such as camera control and incident detection. The platform can reliably achieve latencies below 500 milliseconds.
Stream security: The platform employs various controls for restricting stream access in different operational contexts: